Canadian Art Gala

Join us as we celebrate the Canadian Art Foundation’s 20th-anniversary Gala at the Carlu. The Gala is the most highly anticipated event in Toronto’s visual-arts calendar, as well as the largest significant single source of funding for publishing Canadian Art and producing Canadian Art Foundation programs.

Artwork in the 2015 auction can be previewed at Waddington’s until Sunday, September 13, 2015, at 275 King Street East, Toronto.

Thursday, September 17

6:00 p.m. Cocktails and Silent Auction

The Carlu

8:00 p.m. Dinner and Live Auction

444 Yonge Street, 7th Floor

Silent Auction closes at 10:30 p.m.

PATRON TABLES | Each patron table ($6,500) includes: one table (10 tickets) to the Gala dinner and auction, invitations to the Auction Preview Reception, recognition in the Gala evening program and in Canadian Art, a complimentary one-year subscription to Canadian Art and a charitable tax receipt for the maximum amount allowable.

INDIVIDUAL TICKETS | Each individual ticket ($650) includes: one ticket to the Gala dinner and auction, an invitation to the Auction Preview Reception and a charitable tax receipt for the maximum amount allowable.

2015 Auction Catalogue

1. Shuvinai Ashoona

2. Michael Awad

3. Dean Baldwin

4. BGL

5. Marie-Claire Blais

6. Shary Boyle

7. Bill Burns

8. Edward Burtynsky

9. Paul Butler

10. Tammi Campbell

11. Mark Clintberg

12. Laurent Craste

13. Steve Driscoll

14. Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier

15. Marcel Dzama

16. Julie Favreau

17. Joe Fleming

18. Chad Gerth

19. Nicolas Grenier

20. Bradley Harms

21. David R. Harper

22. Colleen Heslin

23. April Hickox

24. Aryen Hoekstra

25. Jeremy Jansen

26. Sarah Anne Johnson

27. Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline

28. Valerie Kolakis

29. Wanda Koop Research Fund

30. Karen Kraven

31. Kristiina Lahde

32. Evan Lee

33. Derek Liddington

34. Myfanwy MacLeod

35. Jenine Marsh

36. Linda Martinello

37. Kristine Moran

38. Kristin Nelson

39. Tim Pitsiulak

40. Nicholas Pye

41. Harold Town

42. Margaux Williamson

43. Laurel Woodcock

44. Nadia Belerique

45. Alex Bierk

46. Jason Deary

47. Maggie Groat

48. Jessica Groome

49. Tiziana La Melia

50. Braden Labonte and the Cultural Capital Consortium

51. Tyler Los-Jones

52. Colleen McCarten

53. Julie Trudel

1. Shuvinai Ashoona

Cape Dorset–based Shuvinai Ashoona’s pencil-crayon drawings combine aspects of everyday life in North with the fantastical. A world created by cultural reference points—from diverse sources such as Inuit legend and Hollywood cinema—is cohabited by humans, animals and monsters while directly referencing Cape Dorset’s artistic traditions and its place in a larger visual culture. Ashoona’s work has been exhibited extensively, including in the travelling exhibition “Oh, Canada” and at the 18th Biennale of Sydney. Her work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Toronto artist Michael Awad balances documenting urban space and its uses with a deconstruction of the photographic medium—both the apparatus of the camera and the way images circulate in the world. In his best-known work—The Entire City Project, to which Marathon, Toronto belongs—Awad creates immersive, panoramic photographs that seek to contain all the action in the city around him. Awad has exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the 2007 Biennale de Montréal.

Montreal-based artist Dean Baldwin creates convivial situations that blur distinctions between art and life. Like much of his work, Caché suggests a live scenario. Baldwin often performatively prepares meals, serves drinks and entertains—actions that are transformed and reframed when he exhibits documentation and ephemera. Baldwin’s work has recently been presented at Centre Clark, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Space Studios in London, MASS MoCA and the Quebec Triennial.

4. BGL

Quebec City–based artist collective BGL has been exploring the relationships between nature, culture and consumerism for nearly two decades. BGL is known for creating self-referential, site-specific works that combine high and low culture. They transform image surfaces through material interventions and gallery sites through complex installations. The group has exhibited extensively in Canada and internationally; they are currently representing Canada at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

5. Marie-Claire Blais

Montreal artist Marie-Claire Blais works across drawing, painting and sculpture to investigate the spaces and structures surrounding us, from basic architectural forms to vast galaxies and nebulae. Blais often restructures these spaces, altering the familiar, questioning perception and reimagining boundaries and links between disparate elements. Blais’s work is in the permanent collections of the Collection Desjardins d’oeuvres d’art, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

6. Shary Boyle

Toronto-based Shary Boyle’s multidisciplinary practice explores the dualities of the world around her, the personal and the political, the emotional and the intellectual, and the abject and the mainstream. Boyle is well-known for her porcelain sculptures that focus on the intersection of the body politic and the politics of the body, considering the two together with great humanity and empathy. Boyle is a winner of the Gershon Iskowitz Prize, and has exhibited extensively, including at the 2010 Canadian Biennial and the 2013 Venice Biennale, where she represented Canada.

7. Bill Burns

Toronto-based artist Bill Burns works across media to explore threads linking nature, animals and the artistic avant-garde to advanced industrialism and globalization. Much of Burns’s recent work, including Hans Ulrich Obrist Priez Pour Nous, investigates the cult of personality surrounding art-world celebrities and the passive desire they instill in the broader public. Burns has exhibited extensively in Canada and internationally. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Britain, Musée Royal de Mariemont and the Getty Center.

Edward Burtynsky is a Toronto-based photographer who is internationally renowned for his large-format images of landscapes shaped by industry. Burtynsky documents the devastating and often sublime effects that the industrial processes of mining, quarrying, manufacturing, shipping, oil production, recycling and water management have on the natural world. Burtynsky is represented in the collections of more than 50 major museums, including the National Gallery of Canada, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museo Reina Sofía and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

9. Paul Butler

Winnipeg artist Paul Butler’s multidisciplinary practice hinges on the logic of collage, from the traditional approach of combining collected-paper source materials to staging events focused on combining participants and establishing collaboration and community, always with a canny intuition for proximity and balance. Butler has exhibited at venues including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, White Columns in New York, Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland and La Maison Rouge in Paris.

10. Tammi Campbell

Saskatoon-based Tammi Campbell creates drawings and paintings that reflect on the act of making. Her ongoing series Dear Agnes comes from a studio exercise in which she addresses letters to Agnes Martin, filling their bodies with approximations of Martin’s iconic grid-based paintings. Dear Agnes, like much of her other work, draws on the legacies of her Modernist and Minimalist forebears. Campbell’s work is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Mendel Art Gallery.

11. Mark Clintberg

Montreal-based artist, critic, art historian and curator Mark Clintberg works to reveal the fluidity between private and public, intellect and emotion and interior and exterior. Much of his work, including Pudenda 7, questions the inheritance of language and form from previous generations, combining etymology and art-historical references to understand how we make meaning in the present. His work has been shown at venues including the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Alberta and the Walter Phillips Gallery.

12. Laurent Craste

Orléans-born, Montreal-based artist Laurent Craste creates ceramics that explore the indicators of social status and class signified in 18th- and 19th-century decorative collectibles. He recreates historical objects, performing violent or vandalistic acts on them and introducing anthropomorphic elements as if staging a revolution on the old-world values they represent. Craste has had recent solo exhibitions at the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec and the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery.

13. Steve Driscoll

Toronto-based painter Steve Driscoll works in a long-established tradition of Canadian landscape painting. Unlike his forebears—especially the Group of Seven, whom he often seems in dialogue with—Driscoll paints not from observation but from memory, creating ecstatic landscapes vibrating with electric colour palettes. Driscoll has shown extensively in Canada and the United States, including exhibitions at Angell Gallery, James Baird Gallery, Peter Robertson Gallery, the National Arts Club in New York and 107 Gallery in San Antonio.

14. Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier

Winnipeg artists Neil Farber and Michael Dumontier have a long history of collaboration—both were founding members of the Royal Art Lodge and they continue to make work together while also maintaining successful independent careers. Farber and Dumontier’s mixed-media paintings have a strong sense of the absurd that they utilize to forward canny insights into the world around them. Their works are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Canada Council Art Bank and the Winnipeg Art Gallery.

Internationally renowned, Winnipeg-born, Brooklyn-based artist Marcel Dzama creates narrative-driven drawings, sculptures, dioramas, films and paintings with dark storybook qualities—often set at the intersection of the everyday, the occult and the carnivalesque. His work is in many public collections, including those of the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Tate Gallery in London.

Montreal-based artist Julie Favreau works across mediums, weighing the gestural and the concrete to transform the everyday into a fantastical, enchanted space. Many of her works, including an entire day an entire month - doigt, borrow the language of choreography to evoke a heightened sensory awareness in the viewer, inviting concentration, focus and intimacy. Favreau has exhibited extensively in Canada, including in exhibitions and performances at Gallery 44, the Darling Foundry and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.

Toronto artist Joe Fleming is predominantly known for his paintings that include found materials and employ industrial painting processes. Many of his recent works incorporate technical drawings for automobiles that he covers in gestural and graphic elements, simultaneously obscuring the original images and evoking the absent vehicles. Fleming’s work is in many public and private collections, including BMO Financial Group, Scotiabank, AT&T, PricewaterhouseCoopers, HSBC Bank Canada, the Canadian Postal Museum, the Edmonton Art Gallery and the Carleton University Art Gallery.

18. Chad Gerth

Chicago-based Canadian artist Chad Gerth uses a variety of photographic processes to examine surface, hinting at latent nostalgia and memory while pointing out the limitations of the photographic medium. In his Phono series, to which Twenty-Five Miles, 2 Minutes 59 Seconds, Edwin Starr, 1969 belongs, he photographs record players, creating long exposures timed to capture an entire song, though transferring none of the song’s affective power. Gerth has exhibited at venues including MASS MoCA, Zhou B Art Center in Chicago, the Museum of Photography at the University of California at Riverside and the Helsinki Photography Biennial.

19. Nicolas Grenier

Montreal- and Los Angeles–based Nicolas Grenier brings an architectural approach to his painting-centric practice, often creating environments and installations that frame discrete pieces. His work explores the built environment, holding utopian structures alongside realistic commentary on systems of social and power relations. Grenier has exhibited extensively at venues including Oboro, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and the Torrance Art Museum. A different version of Promised Land Template (II) was included in the 2014 Biennale de Montréal.

20. Bradley Harms

Bradley Harms divides his time between Vancouver, Calgary and Los Angeles, restlessly pursuing new forms of abstraction that reflect the changing social and technological landscape around him. His hand-rendered paintings often imitate digital interfaces to manipulate ideas of surface, form and notions of perfection. Harms has exhibited extensively in Canada and internationally at venues including Black and Yellow Gallery, the Glenbow Museum, the Art Gallery of Calgary, Galeria Tuset in Barcelona and Gallery 2 in Chicago.

21. David R. Harper

Toronto-born, Chicago-based David R. Harper works with embroidery, sculpture, textiles and taxidermy to create works that investigate links between memory and present experience. Harper’s references come from a number of time periods and art-historical tropes, and examine ways in which the natural and animal worlds have been ordered, controlled and framed for human convenience. Harper has had recent solo exhibitions at the Textile Museum of Canada, the Kenderdine Art Gallery, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, the Doris McCarthy Gallery and Artspace Peterborough.

22. Colleen Heslin

Colleen Heslin is an artist and independent curator based in Montreal and Vancouver. Her work explores medium crossovers between painting, sculpture, textiles and photography. Through these materials she considers both abstraction and translation of thought, rejecting norms and embracing alternative models of being. Heslin was the winner of the 2013 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Canada Council Art Bank, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Claridge Collection.

23. April Hickox

Toronto artist April Hickox works primarily with photography to create meditative images charting the multilayered relationships between humans and nature. In her series Hancock Woodlands, she at once documents nature, pushing back against man’s attempt to manicure it, and brings the history of the site to the fore. Hickox has exhibited extensively within Canada at the Art Gallery of Windsor, the Harbourfront Centre, Oakville Galleries, Gallery 44, Presentation House Gallery and Mois de la Photo.

24. Aryen Hoekstra

Toronto-based artist Aryen Hoekstra works across media to chart ideologies latent in the moving image and our pervasive visual culture. Much of his work examines the lingering influence of Modernism on our contemporary world, revisiting both the social conditions and the technologies that helped to produce the era’s enduring legacy. Hoekstra has recently exhibited at venues including Mercer Union, Forest City Gallery, Modern Fuel and the Blackwood Gallery, as well as presenting work for Scotiabank Nuit Blanche.

25. Jeremy Jansen

Toronto artist Jeremy Jansen works through sculpture and photography, combining found and created materials and images to reflect the world around him. Much of Jansen’s work exists as a series of dualities balanced in a single image/object, which is at once seamless yet raw, gritty yet beautiful, common yet strange and ironic yet honest. Recent exhibition venues include the Power Plant, Mercer Union, Tomorrow Gallery, Plug In ICA, V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, Greenpoint Terminal Gallery in New York and La Miroiterie in Paris.

26. Sarah Anne Johnson

Winnipeg artist Sarah Anne Johnson alters her photographic work through both digital and haptic means, animating finite captures to imbue them with the vibrant urgency of lived experience. Johnson’s work is in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Canada, the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; she was the recipient of the inaugural Grange Prize and is currently shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award.

27. Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline

Winnipeg painter Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline creates dense, energetic canvases that balance visual immediacy with a contextual and art-historical depth. Often straddling the margin between abstraction and figuration, his rich, gestural works create a unified bricolage that incorporates numerous painterly processes. Kaktins-Gorsline has exhibited extensively in Canada and the United States, including exhibitions at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Foreman Art Gallery, Galerie Simon Blais, Thierry Goldberg in New York and Deitch Studios in New York.

28. Valerie Kolakis

Athens-born, Montreal-based artist Valerie Kolakis works across media in a practice that resembles, at times, that of a detective, a scavenger and an alchemist. She fixes and transforms the everyday, giving it a pensive and illusive quality that often evokes ideas of migration, displacement and ephemerality. Her work has been exhibited at venues including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Galerie Optica, La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, MASS MoCA, Skulpturhalle Basel and at the 2011 Quebec Triennial.

29. Wanda Koop Research Fund

The funds generated from the sale of this work support the Wanda Koop Research Fund, held in trust by the Canadian Art Foundation.

Wanda Koop is known for creating monumentally scaled painting installations that can also include video, performance and photography. Her recent photographs and paintings poetically examine the ways in which one medium informs the other. Koop’s work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, among many others. In 2006, Koop was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada; she has received honorary doctorates from the University of Winnipeg, Emily Carr University of Art and Design and the University of Manitoba for her lifetime of social and cultural contributions.

30. Karen Kraven

Montreal-based Karen Kraven works through image and object to create perceptual and material investigations into the world around her. Her work often looks to the microscopic, using cameras and scanners to probe the depths of everyday materials—sports jerseys, dollar bills and playing cards, for example—creating optical uncertainty and questioning these ubiquitous items. Kraven has exhibited extensively in Canada, including at Mercer Union, the Darling Foundry, Centre Clark, the Blackwood Gallery and the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery.

31. Kristiina Lahde

Toronto-based artist Kristiina Lahde reconfigures everyday objects into geometrically driven and mathematically precise works. She often repurposes measuring tools—tape measures, rulers and metre sticks—bending, folding and altering them to explore new spatial possibilities and introducing a degree of permeability to seemingly rigid systems of order. Lahde has exhibited extensively within Canada at venues including the Power Plant, Koffler Gallery, the Art Gallery of Peterborough, Oakville Galleries, the Art Gallery of Hamilton and at the 2011 Biennale de Montréal.

Vancouver artist Evan Lee explores the productive uses and misuses of digital and analog photographic technologies to reflect on our oversaturated visual culture. Much of his recent work, including Dollar Store Still Life with Decorative Fruit and Feathers ( $ 8 ), uses a scanner instead of a camera to give a heightened, un-iconic flatness to the photographic gaze. Lee has exhibited extensively throughout Canada including at the Audain Gallery, the Art Gallery of Windsor, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Contemporary Art Gallery.

33. Derek Liddington

Derek LiddingtonAs she danced I couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder to catch the final moments of the sun dipping below the horizon. In the morning she ate a banana and I took a few bites out of an apple., 2015
Graphite on paper, 12 x 18.5 in.
Courtesy the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery
Estimate: $3,000 (framed)

Framed by The Gilder

Toronto-based artist Derek Liddington works across disciplines, using drawing, performance, sculpture and installation to explore themes of labour, love, tension and violence. His work balances the personal and intimate with the melodramatic and cliché, creating visual immediacy that quickly gives way to introspection. Liddington has had recent solo exhibitions and performance projects at venues including AKA Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Cambridge Galleries, the Canadian Opera Company and Scotiabank Nuit Blanche 2014.

34. Myfanwy MacLeod

Vancouver-based artist Myfanwy MacLeod works across media to pursue the instability of images and concepts as they change in form and context. Her work explores the boundaries between high and low culture, moving between the two to create satirical investigation of social power structures represented in both. Her recent solo exhibition “Myfanwy MacLeod, Or There and Back Again” was organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and Museum London; other recent exhibition venues include the Royal Ontario Museum, the National Gallery of Canada and MASS MoCA.

35. Jenine Marsh

Toronto artist Jenine Marsh’s sculptural practice explores forms of encounter and sites of negotiation between materials that make the familiar temporarily strange. No Occasion…Nighthawks comes from a series of works that transforms freshly cut flowers, treating them with synthetic rubber, flattening them and pressing them into paint to chart their surface features. Marsh has exhibited across Canada, with exhibitions at venues including G Gallery, Ed Video, Truck, Struts Gallery and Stride Gallery.

36. Linda Martinello

Toronto-based painter Linda Martinello draws on traditions of landscape painting and abstraction to create flowing, dreamlike canvases. Many of her works contain landscapes drawn from a mix of observation, memory and fantasy to create a familiar yet otherworldly effect. Martinello has exhibited at venues including Gallery Page and Strange, Rumi Galleries, the Living Arts Centre, the Peel Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Mississauga and the Durham Art Gallery.

37. Kristine Moran

Toronto-born, Brooklyn-based painter Kristine Moran’s associative gestural canvases reflect on the artifice of social rituals while linking the legacies of seemingly unconnected artists preceding her. Her atmospheric works balance abstraction and representation, and while they are often most legible from a distance, they invite closer viewing with their richly layered surfaces. Moran’s work is in the permanent collections of organizations including Saatchi Gallery, RBC, Bank of Montreal, TD Bank, the Glenbow Museum and the Doris McCarthy Gallery.

38. Kristin Nelson

Winnipeg artist Kristin Nelson works across disciplines to examine and re-contextualize everyday occurrences, drawing out underlying social concerns. Many of her works hinge on recreating mundane objects—paper towels, curtains and scraps of paper, for example—through intricate, labour-heavy techniques to bring a new attention to the ways we interact with them. Nelson has exhibited throughout Canada at venues including Gallery 803, Skol Centre d’art actuels, Parisian Laundry, Plug In ICA and Gallery Gachet. In 2015, she received the Canada Council for the Arts International Residency in Sydney, Australia.

39. Tim Pitsiulak

Cape Dorset artist Tim Pitsiulak is best known for his drawings and prints depicting the interconnected lives of humans and animals in the North. His work often deals with the theme of hunting, creating a space of magical realism through combining works based on photographs taken on hunting trips with fantastical scenes. Pitsiulak’s work is in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canada Council Art Bank and the National Gallery of Canada.

40. Nicholas Pye

UK-born, Toronto-based artist Nicholas Pye works in film and photography to create visually rich images laced with narrative and performativity. In his Rise and Fall series, which To Weather the Storm belongs to, Pye studies the interactions of natural light and architectural spaces, often posing within the frame in a posture inspired by the effect of light in the space. Pye’s work is in the permanent collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington and the Phillips Collection in Washington.

41. Harold Town

Harold Town was born in Toronto in 1924 and died in Peterborough in 1990. Town, a co-founder of the Painters Eleven group, was a prolific painter and printmaker, known for stunning abstractions with rich colour, energy and dramatic intensity. Town’s work is in the permanent collections of many major institutions throughout Canada and around the world. In his lifetime he twice represented Canada at the Venice Biennale, was awarded an honorary doctorate from York University and appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.

42. Margaux Williamson

Pittsburgh-born, Toronto-based Margaux Williamson is an artist, filmmaker, performer, writer and maker of events. Uniting Williamson’s multifaceted practice is a personal yet performative intimacy that gives viewers, readers and participants the feeling of having access to a secret world they were previously unaware of. Her dreamlike oil paintings combine observations from the world around her with images drawn from memory, fantasy and photo albums. Her work has been shown at venues including the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Toronto International Film Festival and Frith Street Gallery in London.

43. Laurel Woodcock

Toronto artist Laurel Woodcock works across media including sculpture, video, audio, photography and performance to create conceptually rich investigations into language. She often borrows from the vocabulary of commercial signage to examine familiar turns of phrase, exploring the malleability and multiple meanings of parlance. Woodcock has exhibited extensively across Canada, at the Power Plant, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Contemporary Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.

Toronto-based artist Nadia Belerique works at the intersection of image and object, constructing installations that engage with the poetics of perception and question the ways images perform in contemporary culture. Her explorations of illusion, depth and flatness lead to repeated perceptual reassessments and spatial renegotiation. Belerique has exhibited at venues including the Power Plant, Gallery TPW, the Art Gallery of Hamilton and Kunsthalle Wien; in 2014 she received the Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival BMW Exhibition Prize.

Toronto-based artist Alex Bierk’s black-and-white paintings map the everyday, showing lived experience in fragments reworked from source photographs. The narrative elements that emerge from Bierk’s work tell deeply personal stories of his past, his friends and family, and his path through addiction and ongoing recovery, speaking to themes of loss, longing and reconciliation. Bierk’s photo-realist works have been exhibited across Canada, including in exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Calgary and the Art Gallery of Peterborough.

Toronto artist Jason Deary works at the intersection of painting and collage, cutting and arranging his materials onto linen to create austere yet energetic works. Deary explicitly draws on painters who came before him, combining gestures and motifs from various 20th-century art movements to make reckoning with the past an active part of his unique visual language. Deary has had recent solo exhibitions in Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto, and has an upcoming exhibition at MULHERIN.

St. Catharines-based artist Maggie Groat creates long-term, research-based projects that extend across media such as collage, sculpture, books, textiles, site-specific interventions and field studies. Her practice hinges on salvaging and assembling materials, and she transforms these into meditations on knowledge, ownership and territory. Groat’s work has been exhibited at venues including SBC Contemporary Art Gallery, AKA Artist-Run, Rodman Hall Art Centre, Gallery 44, the Power Plant and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art.

Vancouver- and Berlin-based painter Jessica Groome creates works that examine the motivations of 20th-century abstraction, inserting her own observational concerns into the stark legacies of her Minimalist forebears. Groome’s canvases often study atmospheric effects—sunshine, rain, cloud cover, snow, dusk and dawn—and the artist works to reconcile them into economical forms with limited colour palettes. She was the recipient of the eighth Plaskett Award and has exhibited at venues including Wynick/Tuck Gallery, G Gallery and Federation Gallery.

Vancouver artist Tiziana La Melia’s multifaceted practice weaves writing, sculpture, painting and performance into installations and texts that explore the translation of language into form and form into language. Her work slips between figuration and abstraction, incorporating diaristic elements while creating links between herself and her female artistic forebears. La Melia was the winner of the 2014 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and has had recent solo exhibitions at CSA Projects, Mercer Union, the Apartment and Exercise Gallery.

Toronto artist Braden Labonte creates and shares narratives through the dissemination of his drawings, paintings, collages and renderings. He is the creative director for the Cultural Capital Consortium, an organization whose projects regularly involve presenting—or perhaps inventing—artists, exhibitions and studies. Labonte has exhibited at venues including the Japanese Cultural Centre, Board of Directors Gallery, Galerie B-312, the Living Arts Centre and First Canadian Place Gallery.

Calgary artist Tyler Los-Jones’s photographic practice often begins with taking familiar touristic images of the Rocky Mountains that he then prints, folds, bends and re-photographs in his studio. These resulting images, including Being with fictions #6, create the illusory space of objects, bringing depth to his ubiquitous source images and subtly drawing attention to our constructed relationship with the natural world. Los-Jones’s recent exhibitions include shows at the Esker Foundation Project Space and the Contemporary Art Gallery of Calgary; he is also participating in the 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art.

Toronto artist Colleen McCarten uses weaving, sewing and other fibre practices to reexamine the legacies of 20th-century avant-garde movements such as Minimalism, hard-edge abstraction and Op art. Unlike her forebears, McCarten embraces the handmade qualities of her processes and materials, drawing attention to their natural imperfections and the labour of craft-based production. McCarten has exhibited at venues including the Gladstone Hotel, Xpace Cultural Centre, Gallery 1313 and the Harbourfront Centre. She was awarded Best in Fibre at the 2014 Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition.

Montreal painter Julie Trudel creates technically complex, minimal canvases exploring visual perception through colour, pigment and pattern. Much of her work follows strictly imposed protocols that govern the materials she uses but leave room for chance and improvisation. Trudel was included in Galerie de l’UQAM’s "The Painting Project," and has exhibited across Canada at venues including Parisian Laundry, Optica, Equinox Gallery and Galerie Colline. She was the winner of the prestigious Joseph Plaskett Award in 2013.

Auction Information

PERSONAL BIDDING DEVICES

Bid on your favourite works of art using personal hand-held devices. Roughly the size of a mobile phone, these bidding devices are distributed at the beginning of the evening, giving attendees the freedom to keep an eye on their bids from anywhere in the room.

GENERAL RULES

All sales are final. No purchase can be returned, refunded or exchanged. All artworks are sold “as is” as exhibited, unless otherwise stated. Successful bidders should be prepared to pay for their purchases in case, by Visa or MasterCard, or by personal cheque payable to the Canadian Art Foundation on the evening of the auction. No HST or auction commission is applicable. All work must be paid for at the conclusion of the auction. Museumpros art services inc. will provide delivery of the artwork after the auction for $90 per delivery plus HST within Toronto, payable by the purchaser directly to the Canadian Art Foundation. Delivery outside of Toronto will be quoted on a case-by-case basis. The Canadian Art Foundation reserves the right to withdraw any work of art at any time before the actual sale.

CONDITIONS OF SALE

Each lot lists an estimated market value obtained from sources the Canadian Art Foundation Art Advisory Committee believes to be reliable. This estimated value is intended as a guide to assist attendees in their bidding. No representation or warranty as to the resale value of a work being auctioned is made or implied.

ABSENTEE BIDDING

To make an absentee bid, complete one form for each lot at canadianart.ca/absenteebid. Submit completed absentee bid forms by email to Ariana Ayoub at aayoub@canadianart.ca or by fax to (416) 368-6135.

Absentee bid forms must be received at the office of the Canadian Art Foundation, 215 Spadina Avenue, Suite 320, by noon (EDT) on Wednesday, September 16. In the case of identical bids, the earliest received will take precedence. Absentee bids will be executed by a representative of the Canadian Art Foundation on behalf of the bidder.